Ever since I began to appreciate the usefullness of a text-to-html conversion filter, I’ve been a Textile man. This is not so much due to preference as it is to convenience; Textile is supported in most of applications I use on a daily basis (Basecamp, Backpack, Typo, etc.), most blogging tools support it, and adding it to applications is made easy by libraries for nearly every language.
Enter: Markdown, a worthly alternative to Textile. The product of John Gruber, it is evangelised by some and feared by others. I am of the latter camp; why would I want to try Markdown when I already know Textile?
It is the fact that I always build support for Markdown into my applications but never use it (why do I implement features I never use?) that I have decided to switch. I mean, I already know Textile. I’ve even hacked a Firefox extension that adds a Textile context-menu to textareas, on whose download page I extol the virtues and prevalance of Textile, only making a passing reference to Markdown, its evil twin. It occurs to me that it’s akin to the never-ending debate over Vim vs. Emacs confession: I am a Vim man and have never tried Emacs.
I’ll write more about this later, but I am hereby converting to Markdown. On the next episode of trying-new-things: dvorak—qwerty’s successor.
I switched to Dvorak one month ago. It takes a commitment, but you won’t regret it!
So, any Dvorak tips? Did you switch your keys around, or did you just end up memorizing the new layout?
I just printed a layout and taped to my monitor.
I wrote a more lengthy article about it on my blog today.